Bremsstrahlung Diode Performance on Mercury MIVA

The Mercury generator is a ~6 MV, ~360 kA, ~50 ns magnetically-insulated voltage adder that recently became operational at the Naval Research Laboratory [1,2], providing a radiation environment of interest to both the DOE and DoD communities. To establish the bremsstrahlung dose and dose-rate production of Mercury, a series of large-area electron-beam (e-beam) diode experiments are performed in which the e-beam is deposited onto either a carbon or an optimized-thickness tantalum converter package. In this paper, experimental results are presented and compared with predictions from LSP (PIC) simulations [3] and ITS/Cyltran (Monte Carlo) calculations [4].